The United States is in the midst of a housing crisis. Prices are skyrocketing, supply is dwindling, and wages haven’t kept up with cost of living. It’s a complicated problem, but the good news is that many of its solutions are relatively simple. Jenny Schuetz literally wrote the book on how good policy solutions can help resolve some of the worst pressures on our stressed housing market.

Jenny Schuetz is a Senior Fellow at Brookings Metro, and is an expert in urban economics and housing policy. She’s also the author of a new book, Fixer-Upper: How to Repair America’s Broken Housing Systems.

Twitter: @jenny_schuetz

Fixer-Upper: How to Repair America’s Broken Housing Systems https://www.brookings.edu/book/fixer-upper

Don’t Think of a Recession https://civicventures.substack.com/p/dont-think-of-a-recession

Website: https://pitchforkeconomics.com

Twitter: @PitchforkEcon

Instagram: @pitchforkeconomics

Nick’s twitter: @NickHanauer

 

Speaker 1:

Housing is a huge problem in the United States, and we here at Civic Ventures have been thinking about it for a really long time.

Jenny Schuetz:

Everywhere in the US ,the poorest 20% of households can’t afford market-rate housing without some extra subsidy. They’re just a bunch of people who earn too little money to pay for the operating costs of housing. People’s wages have not remotely kept up with the cost of living.

Nick Hanauer:

We often say if people have no money, then who will buy the stuff? Well, if people have no housing, who will do the work?

Speaker 4:

From the home Offices of Civic Ventures in downtown Seattle, this is Pitchfork Economics with Nick Hanauer. The best place to get the truth about who gets what and why.

Nick Hanauer:

I’m Nick Hanauer, founder of Civic Ventures.

Zach Silk:

Hey, I’m Zach Silk and I’m the president of Civic Ventures.

Speaker 1:

Well, here’s the thing, housing is a huge problem in the United States and we here at Civic Ventures have been thinking about it for a really long time. Think most of you know we are here in Seattle, and if you’re in one of these blue superstar cities, you’re wrestling with, how do you deal with a booming, growing economy and the reality that many people who work in that economy simply can’t afford to live in the city? There’s this really incredible crisis that’s been going on in the country that has been under talked about.

The basic dynamic is you have skyrocketing prices in these coveted metro areas, and then you have this other thing happening where poor households everywhere, not in these metros, like we’re talking about small places in the middle of the country, cannot afford rent. And so you just have this really crazy dynamic of economic disparity and inequality leading to runaway costs at the top end. Really high pressures on the bottom end. Anyway, I find housing to be one of the underappreciated parts of our inequality problem in the United States, and I think it’s one of the things we need to really wrestle with if we’re going to solve the long term problems of both wealth generation and income inequality.

Nick Hanauer:

Yeah. So we’re lucky today to get to talk to Jenny Schuetz, who’s a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution focused on housing, and she’s the author of this cool new book, Fixer Upper, How To Repair America’s Broken Housing Systems. And the housing problem is hard, and it’s easy to say, but probably worth reflecting on. It’s obvious that if you live in a place like Seattle and have a ton of these super fast growing technology companies here, the senior executives of one of these companies can make a decision in an hour to add 3000 new jobs and start recruiting for them.

But to build 3000 new houses, in the best of cases, would take two to four years. It just like the lag, sweep aside all of the policy problems, just the logistics of building three or 4,000 new houses for three or 4,000 new employees is going to put you behind the eight ball if everything was working perfectly. And now multiply that problem times a thousand and you kind of have our situation. And certainly Seattle has been both the beneficiary and a victim of this kind of growth and dynamics and it’s happening all over the country. And then when you mix in to that basic logistical challenge, the sort of nimby ism that I think everybody sees around us, it’s hard and complicated. But anyway, I mean, it’ll be super fun to talk to Jenny about her book and to get some pointers on how we might all fix this mess.

Jenny Schuetz:

My name’s Jenny Schuetz. I’m a senior Fellow at Brookings Metro based in Washington, DC. I’m an urban economist by training and have been studying housing policy and housing affordability from lots of different angles for many years. And I’ve recently published a new book called Fixer Upper, How To Repair America’s Broken Housing Systems, which ambitiously tries to lay out all the things that are wrong with US housing policies and markets and how to fix all of them.

Nick Hanauer:

I love it. Oh, well you must have been very, very busy given the state of play.

Jenny Schuetz:

This turned out to be my unplanned pandemic project, was writing a book.

Nick Hanauer:

Oh, that’s great. That’s great. How did you get into the housing racket?

Jenny Schuetz:

Completely by accident. When I came out of college, I got hired by a company called Abt Associates based in just outside of DC and they hired me to work in their public housing strategic consulting group. So we basically went around the country to public housing authorities that were in trouble, either financial trouble or lots of vacant buildings and tried to help them fix their problems. And after a couple of years of seeing everything that didn’t work about housing affordability and how different the problems are across cities, places like Boston had a 10 year wait list because nobody could get in. They didn’t have enough homes to go around, and St. Louis had a 20% vacancy rate because there were so many cheap apartments, nobody wanted to live in public housing. So I got basically, hooked on how do you get housing markets to work better across cities and within cities.

Nick Hanauer:

Great. So why don’t you start by telling us a little bit more, obviously this is a huge question, about what’s happening in housing in the United States? What are the challenges? How should our listeners understand the problem?

Jenny Schuetz:

Yeah, so actually the best way to think about this is, there are a couple of problems that are related, but that also benefit from being thought about distinctly. The big overarching problem for the whole country is that we don’t have enough homes to go around. So if you look at how much housing we have been building and map this over time, we basically stopped building homes altogether during the Great Recession. For a period of about four or five years, we built virtually no homes at all. And then it took quite a while to get back to normal levels of production afterwards. So you can think about this as, we are about a decade of under built homes, the estimates are maybe three and a half to 4 million homes across the country that should exist that don’t. So there literally just aren’t places to put all the people who need a place to live.

Nick Hanauer:

Got it. And Jenny, when you say home, you mean place to live? Could be an apartment, could be a single family residence?

Jenny Schuetz:

Absolutely.

Nick Hanauer:

Okay. Yeah.

Jenny Schuetz:

Any kind of home. Yeah.

Nick Hanauer:

Yeah. Okay.

Jenny Schuetz:

Apartments, homes, and that’s sort of the big natural picture, but it’s actually much worse if we zoom in on particular cities and metros, places like Boston and Seattle, most of California, New York, haven’t been building enough homes to keep up with demand for more like 30 to 40 years. So those are your really high cross metros where it really is just a problem of supply and demand. Lots of people want to live. There are tons of well paid jobs, there aren’t nearly enough homes to go around and people are literally living in their cars because there aren’t homes. That’s sort of the one big affordability problem. The other one, which is slightly separate, is that everywhere in the US, the poorest 20% of households can’t afford market-rate housing without some extra subsidy. They’re just a bunch of people who earn too little money to pay for the operating costs of housing. And that’s a national problem, and it’s a low income problem. It’s not about housing affordability or availability. So the solutions to those two problems look a little bit different.

Nick Hanauer:

Right. I mean, the latter problem is a consequence of the last 45 years of wage suppression.

Jenny Schuetz:

Absolutely. People’s wages have not remotely kept up with the cost of living.

Nick Hanauer:

Or anything else.

Jenny Schuetz:

Yes.

Nick Hanauer:

So the latter problem is something we discuss on the pod all the time and is well understood by our listeners. So let’s zoom in on the building challenge, and just to playing it back to you again, because it sounds so simple, can you really map the number of humans living in the United States against the number of houses in aggregate that we have there and watch how close those lines are together?

Jenny Schuetz:

Yes and no. So you can do a national map of, that’s housing permits. So new housing units constructed, adjusted for population, so do it per thousand people. And if you do that at the national scale, you see that we are producing fewer homes per person than we used to. So, that tells you that there’s a problem. And you can see very clearly this big cliff that happens in the great recession and that we have very slow production since then. That can is a little bit misleading to think about it from a national picture because it does vary a lot across the country.

So over the last 50 years, most rural counties in the US have been losing population, which means that there are a bunch of places that actually have more homes than they have people. But there are other places where population has been growing and should really have been growing more. So California is the perfect example. More people would like to move to California to take some of these really well paid jobs, but the cost of living and the lack of housing is actually deterring population growth in the high productivity, high wage cities. So we have an imbalance there and you can see it, but it’s actually, that’s even underestimating the problem.

Nick Hanauer:

Interesting. So now let’s unpack why all these things happened.

Jenny Schuetz:

Yeah, I mean, housing is fundamentally a question of having the inputs, particularly land. Where are you allowed to build homes? And housing is, it’s one of the most tightly regulated markets that we have from a supply perspective. In order to build a house or a subdivision or an apartment building, the property owner or developer has to get permission from a local government. So you can’t just go out and even if you own the property, you can’t just go out and put a house up, you have to get permission. Local governments have made it difficult to build homes, especially in high demand locations, through things like zoning laws that say you’re only allowed to build a single family house on a half acre of land. You have to pay a bunch of fees in order to build this. And importantly, local governments have outsourced a lot of their authority over housing production to people who already live in the community.

So if a developer wants to build an apartment building on a parking lot, for instance, they have to go in front of the neighborhood and say, “”I’d like to build a hundred apartments. And the neighbors get to come out and say, “Yeah, that’s too tall, it’s going to block my view. They’re going to be more cars, more traffic, more kids going to the schools. We don’t want you to build the apartment building.” And very often what happens is, permission is denied or they have to scale back the project. So this sort of democratic process of letting the neighbors weigh in has wound up with us not having enough homes in the places people want to live.

Speaker 1:

Just curious, Jenny, what is the origins of that? I mean, I can understand that forever, people who climb the ladder like to pull it up behind them, but what are the origins of the United States of that? Because is that peculiar to the US?

Jenny Schuetz:

It’s not, but it’s a process that has existed in some form for a long time, but has gotten notably worse since about the late 1960s, 1970s. So part of the issue is that in the boom of the 1940s, fifties and early sixties, most of the houses that we were adding we’re being built in suburban, what we think of as green fields area. So kind of empty fields on the outskirts of a city where there weren’t really neighbors to complain about it. And so you can throw up suburbs, you still can throw up kind of suburbs in distant areas pretty quickly and easily without opposition. The problem comes when you want to build in closer in neighborhoods where there are already residents. And starting in the late sixties and early seventies, there were a couple of large social movements that led to this increasing, what we call community voice, input of the community.

So things like urban renewal programs that demolished a lot of homes in low income, black and Latino neighborhoods led to a pushback of saying existing residents should have a voice in their community. They should be able to stop the local government from doing projects that are harmful. The environmental movement of the 1970s said, “We should look at the environmental impacts of building before we go in.” Those are good origins and good intentions, but this process of outsourcing decision making to existing residents has very much been weaponized by affluent white college educated communities that now use it to stop things like affordable housing for low income households being built in affluent neighborhoods.

Nick Hanauer:

Yeah, I can remember. I mean there’s so many, sort of anecdotal examples of this that I’ve seen before. I remember having a conversation with some folks who ran, literally, maybe the fastest growing company in Seattle complaining about an apartment building that was being built near to their neighborhood. And I was just like, “Dude, what was your plan mean?” Where were you thinking these people were going to live? It’s like…

Jenny Schuetz:

Yeah, communities often want, cities and mayors love to have new jobs and new companies and all of the wages that come with that, but they really don’t like planning for the housing and the schools and the infrastructure to support it if they sort of expect somebody else to pick up the tab.

Nick Hanauer:

So Jenny, what percent, I recognize this is an unfair question, but what percent of the problem is that? That it’s hard to build housing where you’d like to build it?

Jenny Schuetz:

Yeah, that’s hard to quantify at the aggregate level. So the highest opportunity communities, so thinking down to the neighborhood level, I live in Washington, DC, more than half of the land in Washington is zoned for single family detached homes, even though this is a major city. And so we have set aside an awful lot of the land that can’t be touched where you can’t add any additional housing. And the reason is entirely because of this combination of, the rules on paper that say what’s there now is the only thing that’s legal to build, and the neighbors saying, I don’t ever want to change those rules and so there’s really no flexibility. So at some level, I’d say half to two thirds of the land is frozen in amber, and that’s entirely a policy choice that we have made. That’s true in the places that have the strongest demand, that’s not true everywhere in the country. So cities like Houston have actually been pretty good about continuing to add housing, but the places that are most constrained, it’s basically just a policy choice.

Nick Hanauer:

Who’s doing it the rightest and who’s doing it the wrongest?

Jenny Schuetz:

I would say almost all places are doing it somehow wrongly, but there are different approaches to the wrongness. So we can think of a couple of categories of cities. The high cost metro areas on both coasts have made it impossible to build. Places like Houston and Atlanta and Dallas and Phoenix historically have built a lot of housing, but they have grown horizontally. So they keep adding more and more suburbs and subdivisions going farther and farther out. They’ve kept housing pretty affordable for middle income households, but it’s a terrible impact on the climate side. They have some of the longest commutes, everything is car dependent, and so they are starting to run into the limits of that as well. The places where this hasn’t been an issue are kind of the older industrial cities, the Detroit’s and St. Louis’s and their housing hasn’t been that expensive, but because jobs have left and they’ve been losing population. So there’s are sort of three different wrong ways of addressing housing, two of which are really about housing, and one of which is really more about job markets.

Nick Hanauer:

So what else? What are the other challenges?

Jenny Schuetz:

Well, one that we’re definitely confronting at the moment with rising interest rates is, home ownership is really baked in as our primary form of wealth building for most households in the US. And for a long time the model was, you buy a house in your early to mid twenties, you pay down the mortgage, even if the house doesn’t get that much more valuable over time, paying off the mortgage builds up a nest egg. So that has been the post World War II wealth building model for the country. That worked pretty well for a couple of generations for white families. We had lots of legal discrimination against black and Latino households being able to buy homes until pretty recently in our history. We still have barriers that exist, but now we’re also coming into a generational crunch, which is that a lot of younger households, millennial and younger households can’t afford to buy a house.

They have student loan debt, housing prices are high, mortgage interest rates are going up, which makes the monthly cost of home ownership higher. We got a lot of people who think they will never be able to buy a home or if they buy, they have to stretch to really unhealthy levels of debt. And we don’t have an alternative for how people should be building wealth. So we’re going to have a bunch of people who just are less wealthy than previous generations have been. And we have also, I mean the federal government has leaned heavily in promoting and subsidizing home ownership through the federal income tax code. So, yeah, you could save your money and put it in your 401k or just put it in an index fund, but the federal government gives you a tax break if you put your money into home equity, which nudges people in that direction even if they have alternatives.

Nick Hanauer:

That’s right. That’s right. And we collectively spend in the range of a hundred billion dollars a year on the tax incentives for home ownership. Is that the number?

Jenny Schuetz:

Yeah, I’d have to check. So we made some big changes in the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act. So we actually spend less on the mortgage interest deduction than we used to because fewer households take it. But there are a bunch of other tax credits too. So when you buy and sell a house, most of the capital gains are exempt from federal capital gains tax, which is not true for money that you put into a stock market or any other kind of asset. So there are a bunch of layers of subsidy to home ownership in the tax code that don’t exist for asset classes that collectively are pushing people towards that as their primary wealth building.

Zach Silk:

I think this is worth saying a little more, Jenny. We talk about how a lot of people feel like the economy is the weather. It’s just happening out there. They don’t have a lot of control over it. No one has much control over it, but in reality, it’s actually not like the weather at all. There are a lot of policy choices that are made by policy makers to design the weather you’re experiencing.

Similarly, of course in the housing market, this is the case and one of the things you’re pointing to is, we have made really intentional choices to push people into home ownership as their primary asset building. But then simultaneous to that, there was unbelievable amounts of discrimination, of course, that were keeping many people out of that. And then even here today, as Nick was pointing out, even if you have a relatively well paying job, the cost of rent, if you can’t afford to buy, doesn’t allow you to do any other asset building. And our whole structure is designed to push you towards housing as your primary asset building. So I’d just love for you to reflect on this was a design system. I mean, I know it’s sort of happen chance and there wasn’t a master plan, but this is a design system that if people are feeling squeezed, it’s because of policy choices that they’re feeling so squeezed.

Jenny Schuetz:

It’s very much because of policy choices. And one of the complicated things is, it is a system that was designed, but the pieces of the system were designed at different time periods with different goals. And part of the problem is that those pieces together reinforce bad outcomes. So we have the tax incentives built in to encourage home ownership over other asset classes as the primary wealth building. We had legal discrimination and mortgages until 1968, so black and Latino families couldn’t get a mortgage and white families couldn’t get a mortgage to move into primarily black neighborhoods. So making those capital starved.

We also have things like subsidies in the federal highway system that encouraged development of suburban areas and essentially sucked out a lot of the population from the core urban areas, leaving them under invested and with aging infrastructure. And then we have local governments having control over the housing production system. So the federal government has been subsidizing demand for single family homes in suburban areas, primarily for white households. Local governments have been limiting the supply of homes, particularly in high demand areas. And those two things just run into one another as kind of disastrous outcomes for a lot of younger households who tend to rent lower wage workers and for black and brown households.

Nick Hanauer:

Yeah, I mean, the problem is that there is this natural social tension between the people who currently own homes and want them to be the same and increase in value and people who don’t own homes and want them to be cheap and to be able to live wherever it is that they choose to live. So it is tricky.

Jenny Schuetz:

Yeah. Renters and homeowners do not have the same financial interests. And it’s sort of funny because that’s not one of the traditional political cleavages in this country, but I feel like it should be a little bit more, that renters need to recognize that as a group, they have a self-interest.

Nick Hanauer:

Yeah.

Jenny Schuetz:

It’s not entirely true. I will say that homeowners who think that their house going up in value by excluding everybody else, that this is working miraculously for them, are being pretty shortsighted about it. So actually one of the reasons why I wrote the book was to try to convince the median suburban homeowner that a bad system is bad for them too, just in slightly less obvious ways. So the climate impacts are a clear one. Our current system winds up having a much bigger impact on climate outcomes, including at the local level.

If you live in a car dependent city like Houston, your air quality is worse, you’re breathing worse air because not enough people can live close to their jobs in transit. One of the really big societal disadvantages is, we’ve got millions of families with kids who are living in really poor quality housing. So places like Jackson where they don’t have clean drinking water, or homes that have asbestos and lead in them that are going to hurt kids’ brains developing. We’ve got a lot of kids living in these homes, that’s our future workforce and citizenry. And none of us benefit from kids who live in unhealthy homes or in families with high levels of financial stress. So homeowners who think that this is all rosy for them are kind of just kidding themselves about how well it’s working.

Nick Hanauer:

Yeah, for sure. What would you do to fix all this? What’s the path?

Jenny Schuetz:

Yeah, it’s a complicated one because we’ve got bad policies at the federal, state, and local level that reinforce all of these outcomes. So you kind of need more coordinated policy changes across all these levels of government. I mean, local governments, at some point need to change the rules, make it easier to build housing in high demand locations. That’s going to mean overhauling zoning codes, getting rid of some things like historic preservation, making it easier to build these homes. State governments could do a better job of leaning on local governments and nudging them in that direction. And we’re actually seeing a lot of interest by state governments, not just places like California and Washington State, but places like Utah and even Virginia that are talking about what the state government can do. The single most important thing the federal government could do would be to provide more financial assistance to low income households.

Only the federal government has deep enough pockets and can reach everybody, giving every poor family housing voucher or expanding earned income tax credit, the child tax credit, and sending them out every month. That would make so much difference in millions of people’s lives. And that’s just a budget constraint. That’s not hard to do, we just have to make the political decision to do it and fund it. But those are sort of the three biggest things that would get us towards more housing in the right places, more financial support for poor households, and get around some of these distortions in the market.

The encouraging thing is that I think we’re having a lot more productive conversations, both just about the extent of the problem than we used to. So in the last presidential cycle, all of the democratic candidates had a housing platform. The Trump administration put out a big report on the need to build more homes. The Biden Administration’s Council of Economic Advisors is talking about this a lot. They’re also talking more about the need to retrofit existing homes. So this is much more on the national political radar than it’s ever been before. There are a lot of local experiments with policy changes. How can we tweak zoning to make it easier to build and faster to build low cost housing? It’s still going to take a while before we roll this out in enough places to really make a difference. But having the policy conversation is an advantage over not having it.

Nick Hanauer:

Yeah. No. For sure. For sure. And how many housing units do you think, I mean, again, I recognize that the problem is not homogeneous, but how many housing units are we away from balance?

Jenny Schuetz:

Well, the most recent estimates are that we’re probably three and a half to 4 million homes short across the country. And that’s just adding enough new homes to accommodate growth. But if you think about also then, all of the places that have a ton of older homes, which functionally probably just need to be torn down and replaced at this point, we’re talking about millions more on top of that. Homes that probably should have been replaced 15 years ago, but they weren’t because these rules hold them in place too long.

Nick Hanauer:

Interesting.

Jenny Schuetz:

It’s a lot of homes.

Nick Hanauer:

Yeah. So one final question. Why do you do this work?

Jenny Schuetz:

It drives me nuts that something as basic and essential as housing isn’t just widely available and affordable to everybody who needs it. This has really serious repercussions for all of us. We’ve talked some about the climate impacts and kids not growing up in decent quality homes and neighborhoods, and even just things like regional labor markets. So you were saying that the high paid tech companies in Seattle want to be able to hire a bunch of well paid software engineers, but they don’t think about the fact that they’re also going to need to have housekeeping staff and clerical staff and HR staff and the barista who serves you coffee in the morning. We aren’t building cities that allow people in kind of normal jobs to live there. We are only building homes for the software engineers and the CEOs, but your retail labor market needs everybody. And we’ve sort of just said somebody else is going to deal with the problem of housing for non-rich people, but nobody actually wants to provide that. And that hurts all of us. That makes all of our cities less nice and less functional places to be.

Nick Hanauer:

Well, thank you so much for joining us. Congratulations on the new book, and I hope everybody listens.

Jenny Schuetz:

Thanks so much.

Nick Hanauer:

Zach, as I reflect on our conversation with Jenny, I’m really struck by how this is a classic sort of case of a trickle down economics problem that could be solved middle out, in a sense. That we have this housing policy problem driven effectively by market fundamentalism in so many ways. And just a culture of closing the door behind you in many places, making this idea that if we exclude others, it will be better for us, which has created a giant mess for the entire society. And among other things, it makes it hard, even for the people at the top to hire the people that they need to run the enterprises that are making them rich.

And we need to reorient ourselves more towards the middle and the bottom and build a crap load of housing for people and create incentives to build that housing for people if we want the society to be stable and for people to thrive and frankly, for business to thrive. Because, we often say, if people have no money, then who will buy the stuff? Well, if people have no housing, who will do the work? It’s all the same. And I think Jenny’s book really highlights that.

Zach Silk:

You know Nick, one of the things that you often talk about is there is this kind of market, fundamentalist trickle down world. The greed is good world, this kind of winner take all mentality has taken over and scarcity is the kind of primary driver of a lot of individual decision making and that finds its way into policy. And when you live in that world, the actions of NIMBY’s are actually quite rational. It’s a very rational response to say that I am going to close the door behind me and I’m going to protect my own. And this world is scarce and resources are scarce. And these are, frankly, it’s this kind of classic equilibrium system.

You don’t see the benefits of allowing people into your neighborhood or into your town or into your city. And the other dynamic, of course, is there are few ways to truly build wealth in this country available to lots and lots of middle class families other than finding their way into housing. And they see this kind of long term wealth building opportunity, and they somewhat rationally want to exclude others because they feel like that’s how they’re going to win.

Nick Hanauer:

And in addition, if nobody has any housing, nobody will be able to do the work that we need to get done to drive the economy forward. There’s a subsidiary problem, which is, if people are spending 50% of their income on housing, then they’re not going to be able to afford any of the stuff that people are making in the economy either. And we’re just, as usual, being sort of hoisted on our own petard. We’ve outsmarted ourselves and it’s just so clear that we do need to do a better job making it easier to build housing. And again, I do think it’s obviously a separate problem, the wage suppression problem is a separate problem because that feeds into housing affordability for the bottom, basically third of Americans who can’t afford to live anywhere because their wages haven’t budged in 30 or 40 years and housing prices have gone up astronomically. So yeah, just kind of a mess, but classic, a classic trickle down mess and one that we need to work hard to dig out from.

Zach Silk:

Yeah, I couldn’t agree more. And that’s one of the reasons it’s so good to talk to her. I often think like, “You made policy choices to get yourself into this mess, you better be making policy choices to get yourself out of it.” And in this kind of classic way, we’ve made a series of choices through this trickle down lens to benefit the rich and powerful and leave everybody else behind. And it’s about time we really focused our policy choices to benefit the bottom and middle so that everybody wins.

Nick Hanauer:

So in the next episode of Pitchfork Economics, we are going to talk to a fascinating person, the political economist, Mark Blythe, about his two new books. Should be super fun and interesting.

Speaker 4:

Pitchfork Economics is produced by Civic Ventures. If you like the show, make sure to subscribe, rate and review us wherever you get your podcasts. Find us on Twitter and Facebook at Civic Action and Nick Hanauer. Follow our writing on Medium at Civic Skunkworks and peak behind the podcast scenes on Instagram at Pitchfork Economics. As always, from our team at Civic Ventures, thanks for listening. See you next week.